


All My Life I'll Read the Sky

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, M/M, Multifandom Drabble Exchange, Triple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 19:52:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15298818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: The Institute falls, but the Vast still has a debt to collect.





	All My Life I'll Read the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Salamander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Salamander/gifts).



> named for the Oysterband song, After Rain

The day they come for the Institute, the only way Martin can go is up. The building's swarming, and he has no idea how he makes it as far as the roof without being caught. He can hide up there, he thinks, but instead of hunkering down among the gargoyles, he goes as close as he dares to the guttering, peers over, searches the streets below for familiar faces.

"Long way down, isn't it?"

Martin starts around, holding his hands up between him and the speaker: a man, standing so close that Martin's sure he should have seen him. For a moment he thinks the man's scar, a branching, curling thing, is just his own pulsing vision.

"Please," he says, but the man's not made of wax or plastic or too many bones, even if he does have their faint amusement in his face.

"I'm not going to kill you," he says. "No reason to."

"Oh," Martin says. "Um. The others." He gestures back down into the Institute. "I don't know if they-"

"This isn't a rescue," the man says, and by the time Martin's understood it, there's a hand on his collar, hauling him closer to the edge. He tries to pull away, but the man is stronger than he is, and his flailing attempts to dislodge his grip touch nothing but air. "We're owed a life." The toes of Martin's shoes are over sticking out into the void, and the man steps up behind him, chest against Martin's back, murmurs his next words into his ear. "Yours will do."

He kicks Martin's legs out from under him. Martin's shout is lost in a rush of air, and he dangles there, thoughts split with panic. Down below, he can hear someone calling out what he thinks is his name.

* * *

They are alone together, most of the time. Martin's surviving friends seldom come to see him. Mike doesn't make an offering of them, because Martin asks him not to. Mike recognises, with a sort of tight panic in his throat, that he'd do anything for Martin. The others wouldn't, he doesn't think. Not when they don't understand him anymore.

Martin's sight belongs to the Vast now, and he watches only what it wants watching. His eyes show no iris or pupil or sclera. Sometimes, they're the endless aching sky blue, the feeling of falling that Mike knows so well. Sometimes, they're a constantly shifting storm-sea grey that he would swear he could hear, or the grand blank distance between atoms.

Sometimes, they look like constellations, galaxies. Mike knows they aren't. They're the distance between those tiny pinpricks of light, so vast that a person's eyes would bleed trying to observe it, an impossibility between stars.

Martin watches that distance most of all, and Mike hopes it's because he's told him that's the one he likes best. It's an old, barely-used concept for him, having a favourite, but he's sure it applies. He likes to get lost in those endless eyes, feel that weightlessness and drifting in the pit of his stomach, likes to watch the slow shift of Martin's hair as gravity steps away from him along with all the other rules of existence, likes the gentle cool it turns his skin, somehow so distinct from wind-chill.

He still sees Mike, would probably still see the Fairchilds, but he's blind to everyone, everything else. Mike describes to him the things he cares for, and Martin weeps in his arms. Mike doesn't find the angles of it so strange. Just holds him, and wonders at this still half-human monster he's made.


End file.
